The Famished Road (24 page)

That same afternoon three men in French suits turned up at the photographer’s place. He wasn’t in and they stood in front of his glass cabinet, staring at the new pictures he had stuck up. The men stared at the pictures with great interest and they aroused our curiosity and we were impatient for the men to leave. But the three men stayed.

They were dressed identically, wore dark sunglasses, and kept looking nervously at the surrounding houses. They waited for the photographer for a long time and with great patience. They stood in front of the cabinet, without moving, while the sun changed the position of their shadows. The photographer’s co-tenants became curious about the three men and sent children to ask them if they wanted to buy soft drinks or food. They didn’t; and so two women, with children on their backs, went over to them and asked a lot of questions and got quite heated and made gestures which started people gathering and the three men became embarrassed and went for a walk. They walked up the street and I followed them. They went to Madame Koto’s bar and ordered a glass of palm-wine each.

I went back to the photographer’s compound and sat near the glass cabinet. After a while I saw him coming, weighed down by his new myth and his camera and his tripod stand. I ran over to tell him that three men had been waiting for him.

‘For me?Why?’ he asked, turning back in the direction he had just come from.

‘I don’t know, but your compound people gave them trouble.’

‘What did they look like? Are they policemen?’

‘I don’t know. They were tall and wore glasses.’

‘Dark glasses?’

‘Very dark. I couldn’t see their eyes.’

He started walking in a hurry. He went towards the main road. I tried to keep up with him. I held on to his hand.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘Run.’

‘Where?’

‘Away.’

‘What about the men?’

‘What men?’

‘The men in dark glasses.’

‘Let them wait. When they have gone, I will come back.’

Then he broke into a run, looking furtively in all directions, as if he had suddenly realised that he was surrounded by visible and invisible enemies. He ran in a zigzag along the street. He ducked and dashed under the eaves. He wound his way in and out of compounds, crouching low, his tripod bobbing behind him, till he disappeared.

I went back to our compound and sat outside and watched the photographer’s house. The three men didn’t reappear. After a while I went to look at the new pictures in the cabinet. They showed thugs beating up market women. They showed the leader of the Party of Bad Milk from odd angles that made his face seem bloated, his eyes bulbous, his mouth greedy. He had pictures of politicians being stoned at a rally, he caught their panic, their cowardice, and their humiliation. He also had photographs of beautiful girls and a choir of boys and a native doctor standing in front of a wretchedlooking shrine.

I looked at the pictures a long time and I got tired and the sun was pitiless on my brain, burning through my hair and skull and turningmy thoughts into a yellow heat. I went and sat outside our door and I didn’t know what else to do; so I set out to look for Mum at the marketplace.

As I walked down our street, under the persistence of the yellow sun, with everything naked, the children bare, the old men with exhausted veins pumping on dried-up foreheads, I was frightened by the feeling that there was no escape from the hard things of this world. Everywhere there was the crudity of wounds, the stark huts, the rusted zinc abodes, the rubbish in the streets, children in rags, the little girls naked on the sand playing with crushed tin-cans, the little boys jumping about uncircumcised, making machine-gun noises, the air vibrating with poisonous heat and evaporating water from the filthy gutters. The sun bared the reality of our lives and everythingwas so harsh it was a mystery that we could understand and care for one another or for anything at all.

I passed a house where a woman was screaming. People were gathered outside her room. I thought thugs were beating her up and I went there and learned that she was giving birth and that she had been in labour for three days and three nights. I asked so many questions that the gathered adults finally noticed I was a child and drove me away. I went on with my wanderings, not knowingwhere I was headed, except that I had conceived the desire to see Mum. Every female hawker I saw I thought was her.

There were so many hawkers, and all of them selling identical things, that I wondered just how Mum sold anything at all in this world of relentless dust and sunlight.

I walked for a long time, the street burningmy soles, my throat dry, my head sizzling, till I reached the market. There were stalls of goods everywhere. And filling the air were the smells and aromas of the marketplace, the rotting vegetables, the fresh fruits, the raw meat, roasted meat, stinking fish, the feathers of wild birds and stuffed parrots, the wafting odours of roasted corn and fresh-dyed cloth, cow dung and sahelian perfume, and pepper-bursts which heated the eyeballs and tickled the nostrils. And just as there were many smells, so there were many voices, loud and clashing voices which were indistinguishable from the unholy fecundity of objects.

Women with trays of big juicy tomatoes, basins of garri, or corn, or melon seeds, women who sold trinkets and plastic buckets and dyed cloth, men who sold coral charms and wooden combs and turtle-doves and string vests and cotton trousers and slippers, women who sold mosquito coils and magic love mirrors and hurricane lamps and tobacco leaves, with stalls of patterned cloths next to those of fresh-fish traders, jostled everywhere, filled the roadside, sprawled in fantastic confusion. There was much bickering in the air and rent-collectors hassled the women and cart-pullers shouted for people to get out of their way and mallams with goats on leashes prayed on white mats, nodding under the sun, stringing their beads. The floor of the market was soggy with mud and decomposing food and the children ran around mostly naked. The women wore faded wrappers and dirty blouses; their faces were like Mum’s in her suffering and their voices were both sweet and harsh, sweet when attracting customers, harsh when haggling. I went about the market confused by many voices that could have been Mum’s, many faces that could have been hers, and I saw that her tiredness and sacrifice were not hers alone but were suffered by all women, all women of the marketplace.

At an intersection of paths there was a fight raging. Men were shouting, stalls were overturned, dogs barking, sticks whizzing through the air, fish stinking, flies buzzing.

There were so many flies I was amazed that I didn’t breathe them in. I circled round the fight; I went from stall to stall, my head barely reaching the heights of displayed goods. I often found myself staring into the dead eyes of fishes, into basins where great crabs and giant lobsters were entangled in their mass of claws, in buckets where hammer-headed fishes and eels whipped their tails against the aluminium. I searched for Mum till my eyes hurt with too much looking and my head spun with too much exertion. Then, suddenly, with the sun burning itself into evening, with so many people around, everyone active, everything moving, I was overcome with a strange panic. I couldn’t see a single familiar face in that jostling universe. And then just as suddenly, in flashes of lightness and dark, I began to see Mum everywhere. I saw her writhing in the basin of eels. I saw her amongst the turtles in the plastic buckets. I saw her among the amulets of the sellers of charms. I saw her all over the market, under strange eaves, in the wind that spread the woodsmoke and the rice-chaffs; I felt her everywhere, but I couldn’t break the riddle of the market’s labyrinths where one path opened into a thousand faces, all of them different, most of them hungry in different ways.

I saw women counting their money and tying it at the ends of their wrappers.

Children, abandoned temporarily, cried on the floor, under the stalls. I walked round and round the market spaces, unable to go any deeper, unable to find my way out, unable to go on because my feet hurt, and unable to stop because of the perpetually moving crowds who pushed me on or shoved me aside or trampled me or shouted at me and I was confused by everything and I sat under a stall of snails and wept without any tears.

Then time changed. Darkness slowly swallowed the day. I came out from under the stall and struggled through the crowd till I arrived at another stall where an old man sold all kinds of roots and herbs. He was an old man with the youthful eyes of a dove and white hair on his head, a white moustache and an ash-coloured patch of straight beard. His stall was the quietest place in the whole market. He sat alone on a bench.

He called no one to buy his wares and no one came. Behind him, dangling from multicoloured ropes and threads were yellow roots, blue roots, pink tubers, the skull of a monkey, the feathers of a parrot, the dried heads of hooded vultures and ibises, the fierce paws of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and a mirror that changed colour with the lights. His stall was quite clean; behind the ropes and threads and bizarre items was a tarpaulin tent, stained with mud. If he was a herbalist, he must have been a learned and highly selective one, for before I reached him a man in an immaculate white suit approached him, nodded, and they both went inside. They stayed in for a while.

I stared in wonder at the items on his table, the rusted stems of gum trees, red leaves dried in the sun which smelt of distant journeys, carved roots that resembled the crude shapes of human beings, strangely angled bones, the beryl-coloured seeds of rare medicinal plants, transparent seashells, dried flame-lilies, berries and aniseeds and the green pimples of peacocks, dazzling blobs like the eyes of cats that refuse to dry in the sun, crushed cane-brakes and broken rings from the depths of the sea, and a hundred other oddities, all scattered on a dirty blue cloth. I sat on the old man’s chair and waited. And while I waited I listened to the whooping noises behind me in the tent. The noise kept changing into the spectral sound that only spirits can make. Then it changed to the noise of a thick rope beingwhipped round fast. Then into the sound of mermaids sifting the white winds through their long hair on golden river banks.

Then came a scream that was not a scream of terror; it stayed sharp; then it resolved itself into laughter. The man in the immaculate white suit came out sweating, with a little blue sack over his shoulder. The old man also came out. He wasn’t sweating. He regarded me.

‘I’m looking for my mother,’ I said.

‘Who is your mother?’

‘A trader in this market.’

‘Do I know her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why are you looking for her?’

‘Because she is my mother.’

The old man sat down. I stood.

‘Where did you lose her?’

‘At home.’

‘Are you a message?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did she send you on a message?’

‘No.’

‘Did spirits send you to me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does she know you are here?’

‘No.’

‘Does she know where you are?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The old man stared at me with his strange eyes. He picked up a root and turned it over in his hands. Then he bit a little from it and chewed, thinking. He offered me the root. I took it but did not bite into it. He studied me.

‘So does anybody know you are here?’

‘No.’

He smiled and his youthful eyes became clouded, their colour changed. For a moment he reminded me of a hooded bird.

‘So why did you come to me?’

‘I don’t know.’

He picked up another root. It was shaped like a child with a big head. He bit off the head of the child, spat it out, and bit at its arm, and chewed.

‘What is your name?’

‘Lazarus.’

‘What?’

‘Azaro.’

He looked at me again, as if I were some sort of sign.

‘Are you clever at school?’

‘I’m looking for my mother.’

‘Does your mother teach you things?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Like what?’

‘How to fly to the moon on the back of a cricket.’ The old man’s expression didn’t change.

‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’

‘Only in heaven.’

He studied me, touching his beard. He looked round the turbulent marketplace. He got up, went into his tent, and came back with a cracked enamel plate of yam and beans. I was hungry. Forgetting Mum’s warning about strangers, I devoured the food. It was delicious. The old man watched me with a gleam in his eyes. He kept muttering low incantations under his breath. I thanked him for the food and he said:

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Full up.’

‘Good.’

He took the plate in and came out with a plastic cup of water. The water tasted like it came from a deep well. It was sweet and smelt faintly of rust and the strange roots on his table. I drank the water and felt thirstier than before.

‘How are you feeling now?’

I was about to speak when it occurred to me that the world had become dimmer. A faint spell of evening had settled on my eyes. I felt curiously light and inside me there were wide open spaces. I tried to move. But my spirit felt lighter than my body. My spirit moved, my body stayed still. And when I thought I had moved a considerable distance I found that I was actually at the beginning of the movement. Then I felt everything turning round and round, slowly at first, like a circlingwind that was itself the evening settling; and then things went faster and dimmer and the old man’s face grew abnormally large and then it grew so small I could hardly make out his eyes.

And then from a great distance I heard him say:

‘Lie down, my son.’

Then, with the sound of feathers beating behind him, he left in a hurry, dissolving into a bright wind.